Hi everyone, hope all is well. Just over a week since the last post but I thought I’d kill a little time before going to get my eyes tested this morning. Although I rarely ever wear my glasses, I’ve had the same frames for, I dunno, 10 years or something now? And I could probably count on my hands how many times I’ve actually wore them. It’s just awkward though as I have one long sighted eye and one short sighted, the long sighted eye has a plastic lens in it as I got cataracts removed and the short sighted right eye is my more dominant eye although there are times when your head goes all weird when the left eye takes over. The thing is I can read and I can see into the distance pretty well, just with one eye for each.
Wearing the glasses as well they always slip off when I’m reading which was irritating so I end up just taking them off. Maybe this time I’ll start to wear them…
I’ve had quite a nice week, the sun has certainly helped, sitting out and reading and I’ve started a short walk which takes about 30 minutes and is quite a nice walk and apart from the one slope it’s fairly flat and nothing too challenging. On the walk I’ve already got to see a few not so common birds, although when I first seen one I thought it was a buzzard, could only really see the silhouette of it but I thought I noticed a flash of white under the wings, it was probably at least 50m away and it wasn’t till I got home and looked at the pictures that I noticed the forked tail which wasn’t a buzzard and turned out to be a red kite.
On the same walk I seen a bird I had never seen before, I only seen it for a second or two and the only reason I seen it was because someone else was looking at it. From what I took in it was in between the size of a robin and blackbird and appeared to be all black with a white chest. Couldn’t find anything that fitted the description but my dad was able to tell me it was a dipper, would be good to get a picture of one and I’ve been keeping an eye out for it since then.
On Sunday with the weather being good I thought I would plan a photo, there was an ISS pass at 8.50 and I thought I would walk up to the Mound to have the ISS pass in the background above the Mound. I got there about 20 mins before and was trying different settings but they kept burning out as it was still to bright and I didn’t think I was going to get the shot. I got a nice late sunset pic over the town which I really liked, the different layers and colours I thought were really nice.
A couple minutes before the pass I went to the spot that would have been ideal and the shots still burnt out, but thankfully *just* in time it reached a point were the shots were working and I managed to get a decent pic of the pass which I was quite happy with. There was also a chance of aurora but looking North there was a bit of a mist and you could see the lights from Lisburn and I didn’t want to stay out too long so I just went on home. Thankfully it’s only 5 mins from the house, like everything here.
Before getting sick I had started to try to reduce the amount of equipment I had to carry around and I ended up getting a phone with a good camera, so rather than carrying around the big camera and all the lenses and tripod, I just have my phone, a small tripod and a selfie stick, also have a longer selfie stick (3m) for using the 360 camera. So I have a small hip bag which it all fits in. And now it’s paying off with the way my back is, I wouldn’t be able to carry around all the other stuff, in fact it was lifting the bag off the floor onto the bed that caused one of the fractures in my back. I’m still holding onto the stuff atm as I would like to try some deep sky stuff from the back but I’m not going try that just yet.
On my walk yesterday I took a few 360 pics and was playing about with them yesterday, it’s nice that with the one 360 picture you can modify the shot to get dozens of other pictures and styles, it’s pretty nice.
The last couple of weeks my nose has been quite runny and I’ve been coughing a lot more, it was only on Friday that I realised that it was probably my hay fever coming back, my main concern was coughing too much and breaking a rib as that was something that happened last year as well. With the rain yesterday it seems to have settled a lot this morning but I do have this really annoying wheeze so I’m still coughing and not sleeping great and chest and stomach is sore with coughing. I also have aggravated a rib again and can’t lie on my side which isn’t helping with the sleeping either. Nothing really bad butt it’s there!